Yanking through the enveloping gray void, Peter pulled his gym uniform t-shirt up and over his head. With his feet planted on the cold and desolate stretch of Watson’s metallic desk, the boy savored the fleeting solitude he’d been granted as the woman jogged back out into the gym to ensure his athletically-capable classmates put the equipment away properly. These days, changing outfits with a modicum of privacy seemed to be a privilege.

                Of course, he knew it couldn’t last. The doorknob creaked from behind and the freshman heard the thudding footsteps of his gym teacher  re-entering the office with a confident clamor.

                “Hey, sweet pea,” Ms. Watson crooned in her near-baritone octave. The forty-something eased back into her swivel chair, flashing a slightly crooked smile to her five-inch student midway through his strip. A sheen of sweat was glazed over her tanned temple from more than an hour of stomping from one end of the gym to the other, keeping students on deck as they queued up to punt the kickball.

                The teen gulped, keeping his back to the woman. Sweet pea? He could hear the leg of the enormous chair shrilling as she leaned forward, rearing her massive face at an unnecessary proximity to his half-exposed body.

                “Peter?” she buzzed, and suddenly the boy felt the leathery pad of her fingertip tickling against his bare back and tracing a precise line down his spine, coming dangerously close to his tailbone before she pulled away.

                In surprise, he jerked around, nearly tripping over his own discarded gym-wear still wrapped around his ankles. The sensation of her callused finger caressing along his skin lingered uncomfortably in his cortex like a bad taste. For an instant, it felt like she went in for another stroke, but that was impossible now as he faced up to her looming form.

                “Sorry about that,” Ms. Watson chuckled, ruffling the short brown sprigs of her hair between a few meaty digits. “I didn’t mean to startle ya, hon. Just wanted to make sure you were still with me there. You’re my responsibility in here, after all.”

                “I’m…. with you,” Peter repeated back.

                “I’m glad to hear it,” she sighed. Her broad, chapped lips bent into the widest smile Peter imagined she was capable of. He could see the laugh lines straining around her matured dimples. “I mean, I know you’re probably under a lot of stress. You know, after what happened last week.”

                “Y-Yeah,” Peter mumbled, bucking his head up and down. “Right. That… it’s really not a big deal, honestly. I know it looked like it was, but I was just a little nervous about it then, and-”

                “Now, honey,” Ms. Watson uttered, cutting him off. Her left hand ascended over the edge of the desk, coasting along its sleek surface until her gently clenched fist was poised directly in front of her unwilling protégé. Her index finger steadily peeled away from its fellows, until the ovular pad of the woman’s finger was aimed squarely at Peter’s face, half an inch away. “I’m a physical education teacher. Believe me when I say I don’t take safety lightly, whether it’s in the gymnasium or anywhere else. Like in here.”

                “I… know,” Peter said. His eyes were locked to the gargantuan fingertip, one he had no doubt was strong enough to support a bowling ball just by a single crook.

                “And I’m not just talking about safety for your body, though… I can’t help but worry about one as small as yours,” the woman admittedly with artificial concern infused into every word. “It’s a mental thing, too. Stress can really break someone down, brain and body. So it’s all connected.”

                “Uh-huh,” the boy answered.

                “And… I have to tell you, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this myself,” she continued, caressing the fingers of her free hand over her chin. “About how I found you earlier this week, stuck down in there… I know you said you’re afraid they won’t let you stay here, if that gets out. I get that. You want to be treated like a big boy, right?”

                “Yes.”

                “But to be frank, the whole matter is… well, it’s been taking a toll on me,” Ms. Watson announced under her breath, slogging through the throaty syllables with some theatrical agony. “You can understand that, right?”

                “I t-think so.”

                Ms. Watson leaned down, pas the threshold of the cushioned swivel seat. Below the expansive platform of the desk, Peter heard the telltale thump of rubber soles landing on the ground as sinewy, feminine fingers pried them away from sock-clad heels.

                “So I guess you understand too, then…” she continued. Her bulbous biceps inflated within her lean limbs as her fingers continued bustling, out of sight. “…I can’t just go on, holding onto stress like that. And neither, I believe, should you.” Ms. Watson leaned away from the edge of her desk, rolling on the chair toward the window a mere two paces away. Without looking at it, the woman coiled the tips of her fingers around the plastic wand that dangled from the drapes, giving it a twist that tightened the mini blinds even further shut with a damning clack.

                “S-So… so you’re saying you’re…” Peter swallowed, feeling his throat thickening at the prospect that his joyride in human normalcy might be approaching an abrupt halt. “…you’re… going to tell the school about it?”

                “I’m beginning to think so, yes,” Watson said. “The school, your… mom, especially. I know she must be worried about you. You say she works a full day, has to be thinking about you that entire time, and she doesn’t get a foot rub when you come home, well…”

                And suddenly, in a smarting moment of unfortunate clarity that housed itself directly in Peter’s brainstem, the boy clicked the misshapen logic puzzle together.

                “I’m sorry, sweet pea,” the woman repeated again with solemn care. She reached back over the desk, her fingers opening up and curling back toward Peter’s shoulders. The leathery protrusions arched, kneading down to the small of his back, this time brushing ever so lightly along his rear. “I know this place means a lot to you.”

                Peter tried not to wince at the gentle grinding of her fingerprints marking up his bare body. His fingers grappled weakly with the shirt, too caught off guard, and felt it fall away.

                “But the fact remains,” she shrugged. “I just can’t go on with all this stress built up inside. Unless, you know…”

                “Unless what?”

                “…unless there was a way to do something about it. Something to make the stress go away,” Watson relented. She leaned back away into the chair, earning a chorus of squeaks from its chilled joints. At once her toned, sun-cooked thighs were arcing into view above the horizon of the desk, filling Peter’s view with the bumpy terrain of the woman’s mighty quadriceps. Following the sculpted pillars of her upturned legs, the boy looked up just in time to see his gigantic teacher’s pair of newly freed naked feet, glossed with a moist twinkle brought on by the heat, light speckling in between her toes from the ceiling bulb.

                “You, um…” he muttered, unable to believe the words he was choosing to formulate. Still, the image of himself someday dressed in a miniature graduation cap flashed through his mind’s eye, along with various incarnations of Lisa’s smiling face that he might not get to see anymore on a regular basis, and the judgment was made abundantly clear. “…you want… a… you know, me to… give a…”

                “You’d give me a foot rub?” Ms. Watson finished for him, bursting with falsified surprise. The painfully cheerful grin returned in full force. Her legs bowed at the knees, lowering her pair of golden-brown, blister-weathered kickers nearer and nearer to where Peter stood on the desk. With a squishy clump, she deposited both heels side-by-side not two inches away from her miniature student’s head. “Hon, that is… that is just about the nicest thing anyone’s offered me in a long time, I have to say…”

                “Uh-huh.” Peter drank in the sight of the twin human canvases before him, each immaculately carved by decades of physical activity and pounding on pavement, grass, and turf.

                “Listen, I… hate to rush it, but if you’re serious about… taking away some of my stress, we may need to get a move-on,” the teacher explained. Already she had her chin rested against her upturned fist, delicately balanced on the arm of the chair like a queen relaxing into her throne. “So what’s it gonna be, sweet pea? Care to help a woman out?”

                “Okay,” the boy said and, before he could let himself dwell on what a bizarre and haunting escapade his school career was turning out to be, he reached forward, taking hold of the woman’s meaty, greasy soles, one in each hand.

                The vertical surfaces were harder to negotiate than he was expecting. His gym teacher clearly didn’t just talk a big game; her skin was toughened, so thick it was difficult to get a good grip on. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, Peter’s miniscule fingers discovered wrinkles into which he could sink a better handle. The flesh was spongier in these shallow rivers of flesh, already soaking into his hands as the boy went to work massaging the softcore-blackmailer’s weary peds.

                Each of the numerous wrinkles that curved in slanted pathways down the high-arched ball and through the valley of Watson’s sole seemed to breathe with a life of their own, flexing and closing in tandem with the woman’s happily bouncing toes above. Peter did his best to keep up, but occasionally felt his fingers being clenched into the folds and flaps of damp skin, probably by design. The pair of feet stretched so high that the boy realized he couldn’t even touch those dancing digits, even if he stood on his own toes.

                Painted into every crease and every fleshy crinkle was that viscid mess of lustrous sweat that he’d only had the misfortune of glimpsing soaked into Ms. Watson’s socks before. Now, there was no buffer zone, not even that papery cotton to keep his sensitive olfactory nerves separated from these rudely potent monuments of putrescence, and God, Peter wished he had that divider back.

                The boy felt a cough forming in his lungs, freshly deprived of oxygen as he rubbed. The rank excretions of the woman’s middle-aged pores seemed never to run out, and in fact increased as Peter pressed his hands harder into the beefy surface. Ripe with the flavors of rubber and overheated flesh, and dotted by soggy granules of cotton jam along the wall of sole skin, Ms. Watson’s appendages emanated such a sucker-punch of an odor they almost seemed to create their own atmosphere.

                 The minutes ticked by. Hardly five had passed, but the aroma was so pungent, pinching at Peter’s nerve endings and even making him dizzy, he was having trouble keeping up.

                “Don’t forget these, hon,” Ms. Watson reminded perkily. Each of her feet arched downward into his reach, simultaneously closing every crisscrossing sole wrinkle and momentarily capturing Peter’s fingers in the doughy valleys.

                The freshman looked up, poorly timing the turn of his attention as the woman’s middle toe, rancid and sticky with her daily effort, plastered itself right into his face. The teen felt its clay-like tip mush into his nose and mouth, briefly closing his whole air supply. As he backpedaled in a panic, feeling his teacher’s juices tattooed over his lips as a particularly sour memory, Peter heard her suppressing a guttural chuckle.

                “Sorry about that. That’s on me,” she said. The toes splayed and reached just a little higher, giving Peter more breathing space, though not much. “Why don’t you go ahead and reach on in there? Don’t be shy. That’s where I need it the most.”

                Peter nodded, even though she couldn’t see him behind the towering barriers of her propped feet. Fighting back another hack at the oily air, he dutifully tucked his quivering hands into the first velvety crevice between Ms. Watson’s big and second toes. Immediately on impact, he experienced a fresh well of sweat oozing from her skin, but Peter ignored it, only molested by a single drop of salty liquid dribbling down his arm as he continued scouring the mounds of awaiting flesh.

                “Hoo-boy, now this is exactly what I needed,” Ms. Watson informed him, letting a deep moan dangle on the back of her words. “I was right about you. You really are good at this, and I bet you didn’t even know it, did you, hon?”

                “Uh… n-not really, no.” Peter instantly regretted opening his mouth again to speak, as it allowed in another huff of that noisome musk seeping so generously from between the woman’s toes, which were slowly creeping closer to his scalp again. He even felt the burly digits cresting against the top of his hair, ruffling the shaggy locks. His knees sunk awkwardly into the wall of her slimy sole flesh closing in as well.

                “Just goes to show you. You never know what a person is capable of until they try,” she continued, shutting her eyes, her lips hanging open a second longer. Peeking around the bulwark of his teacher’s toejam-smeared instep, Peter couldn’t help but notice the woman’s tongue lap softly at the corner of her mouth. “That’s what I try to teach my students every day. And I hope it’s something you’re learning about yourself in this school. I… definitely understand why you should be able to continue learning here, sweet pea. I really do.”

                Peter robotically bobbed his head, electing not to consider that possibility now. If this indeed was representative of his life’s map, it was a thought just a little too nauseating for the boy to handle.